


Equivalent Exchange

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Archivist Jon, Avatar Tim, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Is this a fixit it?, Murder, Suicidal Ideation, Suidice Mention, character resurrection, monster frenemies 5ever, refefrences to non-consensual sex work, references to domestic abuse, there's quite a lot of murder actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 11:41:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17202794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: There was always going to have to be a sacrifice.





	Equivalent Exchange

It hurts. It hurts on a level he didn’t know _could_ hurt. Every part of him- 

No. No part him. Not the parts.

_He hurts._

YOU KNEW THERE WOULD HAVE TO BE A SACRIFICE.

The words pierce the pain, like a stone sinking into still water. He had known. Hadn’t he? It was hard to think, hard to remember, stripped down to a single, screaming quintessence of self. There had been— something —

_What do you see?_ A memory comes back , in a voice he knows, but there’s nothing to see in this endless void. He had seen  the circus . The detonator. The grisly, shrieking clown.  And then —

YOU WANTED DEATH, says the voice he doesn’t know.

He wanted revenge. He wanted freedom.

YOU WANTED DEATH.

Sometimes all three of those were the same thing.

Around him is a nothingness so utter, so complete, not even the Eye could hope to pierce it. He isn’t sure if he hurts because he’s sublimating away into  this void or because something will not allow him to do so. He cannot speak, stripped of form and language, but he can  organize his thought behind a single desperate desire .  _Please._

He waits for an answer. He waits, and he hurts, and there is nothing but hurting in that void,  sans eyes and teeth and taste and everything _._ He might’ve waiting forever. 

And when the answer comes, he is afraid.

YOU KNEW THERE WOULD HAVE TO BE A SACRIFICE.

XXX

It takes forty days and forty nights – a nice round number, very Biblical – to find his way out of his own mind.

The Archivist comes back first, noting the emotions on the faces around him but utterly indifferent to them beyond how they color the information they give him. Elias is still in prison, now tangled in a web of his own making, but still alive. Peter Lukas run the Institute more as an absentee landlord, probably a necessary concession to his own patron. Daisy is missing, though there have been sightings, and Basira won’t give up (misguided, baseless) hope.

Tim is dead, and the Archivist doesn’t feel much of anything about this. When he is Jon again, he will be able to grieve, but not now. 

“It was a closed casket funeral,” Martin mentions, long having babbled his way past anything of significance, but the Archivist notes it down because the Archivist notes everything. (How had he survived, not just the blast, but forty days dead and dreaming?) “I-I thought someone should go. From the Institute, you know. Just to...see him off, I guess. I know it’s stupid-”

“It was kind of you,” Basira insists, touching Martin’s arm.

The Archivist fil es  that away,  _kind,_ for later consideration.

XXX

He hurts, but it’s a different kind of hurt, not that he can put the difference into words. He’s not in the void anymore, but he’s still in the dark, senses muffled and muted as he blunders around, lost. There are times when it hurts less to be still than to move, so he keeps still until the pain makes him move again. He doesn’t sleep.

He’s not alone in the dark: there are faint lights, in places, and he chases after them if for no other reason than to find out what they are. Most of the time he doesn’t catch them. Most of the time he gives up.

When he finally catches one, it evanesces in front of him. But in the same instant, the darkness gets a little brighter, a little louder. And the pain ebbs a little bit.

It takes less time for him to catch the next one.

XXX

“Oh, and Georgie wanted me to tell you—“ Melanie stops the Archivist from leaving at the end of their Monday morning staff meeting. The name _Georgie_ stops him. “There’s something new on the ghost-hunting circuit. Rumors about a new haunt, pretty consistent and pretty closely spaced.”

“How does she know it’s something substantive?” the Archivist asks, one part of his mind turning over that name, _Georgie._

“She doesn’t,” Melanie admitted. “Nobody’s looked into it properly yet, but—it’s in Great Yarmouth, Jon. They’re calling it the Burnt Man.”

That caught his attention properly.

XXX

By the third or fourth time he catches one of the lights, he can see shapes more clearly in the darkness. He _think_ more clearly, more strategically: there are buildings here, or something like them, and while he can’t get inside them, the landmarks help him navigate.

The darkness never really changes, but the temperature does, and he finds it hurts less to be active when it’s cooler; night, let’s call it. He can discern wet and dry, as well, and though the wet doesn’t particularly bother him (not compared to the _hurt)_ it does mean the lights are fewer and farther between.

He can hear things: voices, maybe. They echo between buildings but he can’t make out the words. But he is starting to know this place of darkness, and if he can just see a little better, if he can just _think—_

The next light he catches evaporates like the others, but afterwards the darkness resolves enough to see there’s something left behind. He...crouches? He has enough of a form to crouch, now, and hands to grope and feel at the shapes puddled on the ground.

Cloth, he thinks. Leather. A heavy metal cylinder, like a baton or a torch.

Clarity comes down on him like a building.

XXX

Melanie works the rumor mill with the ghost hunters who’ll still talk to her, takes a few statements from alleged witnesses over Skype or the phone. There’s a lot of buzz, she says, but not much substance. A lot of talk but no action, like they suspect they’re on the edge of something real.

Basira works her police contacts. “There’s been a couple of missing persons cases that’ve got the responding officers sectioned. Witness finding piles of clothes with no bodies in them. Most them seem to have been rough sleepers, so there might be more that just weren’t reported, but the most recent was a security guard.”

“CCTV?” the Archivist asks.

Basira shakes her head. “Cameras seem to cut out when whatever it is happens. Couple times they’ve got shots of the victims sitting or walking, then the blackout, then…clothes. Which doesn’t sound like anything else linked to the Stranger...”

No, simple disappearance is more like the Lonely, or perhaps the Dark. A gaunt, blackened ghost would seem tied to the Desolation, which had been allies of the Stranger, though. And the Stranger’s entire essence is that appearances are deceiving.

(Death and resurrection don’t sound like the Eye, but he is still here, and breathing again.)

Martin is supposed to be delving into the history of the area, to see if this Burnt Man was ever sighted before 2017, but when he comes around the Archivist’s office he doesn’t bring a report. He brings a mug, steaming slightly, with a Twinings bag just breaching the milky surface, and sets it on the corner of the Archivist’s desk. “Haven’t found anything yet, but Yarmouth’s not exactly a hotbed of—“

“What is this?”

Martin blinks, and shrinks back a little at the Archivist’s tone. “Um—tea? I made—it’s no trouble, I-I made some for everyone…”

The ceramic is hot to the touch, but not painfully so. The heat transfers to his fingers when wraps a hand around, a distinct contrast to the cool air of the archive.

It is...pleasant.

“Sh-should I not have brought you tea?” Martin asks warily, as though he is in the room with a dangerous animal and does not know exactly what it’s going to do next.

Martin is _kind._

And it’s Jon who says, “Thank you,” and sips the tea.

Later that evening, he calls Georgie. “How did you start to feel things again?”

She sighs into the phone. “Practice.”

XXX

He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t think he _can_ stop.

Not just because he hurts (though he _hurts)._ Not just because he’s alone, in this half-lit world of numb silences. Not just because it’s hard to think, hard to remember when one of those blurry figures come within reach, all warmth and dazzling brightness.

It doesn’t horrify or repulse him, like it should’ve. Like it would’ve before—it’s hard to think about all the befores, but there was a version of him that wouldn’t have done this. There was a version that would’ve stopped.

Now, though, emotions are as muted as everything else is for him. Now killing is just a thing he does instead of breathing, and he can’t stop it any more than time or gravity. And if he doesn’t do it, something else will.

He doesn’t think it’s painful for them, at least.

XXX

The nightmares still come; some things are not negotiable. Jon sleeps in bursts between them, or takes sleeping pills, though he latter tend to leave him with an unpleasant hangover the next morning.

But dragging himself back to the world the first time taught the Archivist a thing or two about lucid dreaming. He can try to spread the pain around, keep from visiting any one dreamer more often that necessary. Keep himself between his victims and the vast and lidless Eye that’s trapped them both.

Perhaps that, too, is kindness, of a sort.

XXX

He has enough of a form now to hang clothes on it. Or maybe he’s aware of his form enough to want to. He takes a coat from one extinguished light, a hat and gloves from another, and in the cool of the night he can walk between them without eliciting a reaction. Can get close enough to make out faces, voices, against the glare.

Can think clearly enough, now, to read newspapers out of the bins and try to figure out what the hell is happening to him. What the hell he _is._

He’s peering at a newspaper, trying to make the word resolve, when someone touches him.

Someone touches his sleeve – he squints. It’s a girl, and her clothes don’t seem right for the cold or the wet. He knows he can pass as a person now but it still surprises him, that somebody notices, that somebody sees. She’s the first person who’s touched him without disappearing.

He can just make out that she’s talking to him. Something about _looking for a good time...?_ It sounds nervous and awkward and she has a hard time meeting where his eye should be.

When she does, she recoils, and she runs.

He follows her. He doesn’t know why he follows her. Maybe he wants to apologize. Maybe ask for help. Maybe he just wants that moment of connection, that moment of being seen, after so much time alone in the darkness. He only knows that he follows her, and he doesn’t have to run, because once the decision is made he’ll always get there in the end.

She’s in a building when he catches up – that worries him for a minute, because buildings are still hard. But when he peers through the darkness he makes out a terrace, row on row of identical frames. He finds the door she’s behind, but as he feels for the knob he realizes he can hear voices inside – they must be really shouting, for him to make out the words here.

_I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t make me go back out there!_

_Jesus Christ, Jess, what the fuck is wrong with you, you can’t even suck cock right?_

He pulls off his gloves before he knocks.

The girl doesn’t answer the door. The blazing figure who answers is taller, heavier, and he thinks he smells smoke. _What the fuck do you want,_ is probably what it’s trying to say, but he puts his hand to its face before the sentence is finished and an empty tracksuit flutters to the ground.

The dark resolves a little more. Sounds come in focus. The pain recedes, and there’s even a hint of something more like satisfaction.

She’s further into the house, collapsed on the floor and screaming. It takes him a minute to realize she’s screaming words. _What are you, what are you, what are you._

He has killed so many people and this is the best he’s felt for weeks. Stringing words together is hard; making his mouth move the right way is harder.

For the first time since he squeezed a detonator, Tim Stoker tries to speak.

XXX

Jessica Lawson, 19, shows up at the Magnus Institute shaking and sleepless, which activates all Martin’s caretaking instincts on sight. Jon it more than happy to let him take the statement, and nearly forty minutes later Martin comes to him looking worried. “I sent her home. I mean, I, er, she didn’t have anywhere to stay, so I sort of called her an Uber and gave her some cash for a hostel...”

“She said her statement pertained to the Burnt Man of Yarmouth,” The Archivist prompted. “Was she right?”

“Yes, actually.” Martin slid the cassette across the desk. “And—and I think it might be urgent.”

“Why?”

“Because she says the Burnt Man sent her to us.”

Jon listens to the tape, which begins with several minutes of Martin fussing over Miss Lawson and reassuring her that the Institute doesn’t habitually share statements with the police. It ends with the Burnt Man obliterating her (abusive and, frankly, rather vile-sounding) boyfriend with a touch, and then leaving with an unmistakable message.

“ _It sounded horrible”_ Miss Lawson’s voice quavered from the tape. _“Not human. Like...when a noise is so deep and loud you feel it more than hear it. But also sort of slurred, like my gran after her stroke. Like it didn’t know how to use the shape it was in. It said, ‘Ask the Magnus in.’ Or that’s what I thought at the time, anyway. Maybe it just couldn’t manage ‘institute?’…”_

“It’s a trap,” is Melanie’s conclusion, when Jon presses stop.

“It’s suspicious,” Basira agrees.

“It’s a coincidence?” Martin suggests, though even he doesn’t really seem to believe it.

“It’s a challenge,” Jon says. “And I don’t want to wait and see how many more pimps and rough sleepers this Burnt Man is willing to kill in order to get our attention.”

He buys coffee and pastries for the drive up to Yarmouth, as consolation. As practice in kindness to the people he’s chosen to trust.

There’s still a crater in Regent Road where the House of Wax used to stand, screened behind tarpaulins and segments of chain-link fence. There’s still a feel to the whole area, a _resonance_ that sets Jon’s teeth on edge, though he can’t say for certain it’s not all in his head. But it’s not just a pilgrimage; it’s the original focal point of the Burnt Man’s activity.

“So, what, we’re doing this as a walking tour?” Basira asks. She’s got the map with dates and locations all plotted, the slow shift from mere apparitions to puddles of empty clothing.

“It wanted our attention,” Jon points out. “We can demonstrate that it has it.”

She grimaces, and says, “Don’t much like using ourselves as live bait,” as if Peter Lukas hadn’t delivered her a handgun along with his budget approval.

“I’ve got pepper spray,” Martin volunteers. He’s been looking at the ruins of the House of Wax with something like sick fascination.

Melanie seems to be trying to look at anything else. “Like that’s going to do any good if it comes at us.”

“Stay close,” Jon tells them, hoping that sternness will communicate concern. “Keep alert. Speak up if you see something.”

Basira and Martin nod; Melanie pantomimes a salute. They head down Regent Road, towards the casino, their mere presence a challenge answered.

XXX

He hid himself in a house on the terrace – not the one where the girl and the tracksuit had been, but another vacant one on the same row. He waited through the heat of the day, slipped out at night to find someone else to kill, hid again.

He doesn’t need to sleep anymore. Instead, he watches the watchers.

The police came round to investigate the empty house and the empty clothes, but that was days ago. Nobody’s been back since, not even the girl. A few figures in dark clothes try to break in at one point; Tim makes them pay for it, hides the evidence. Nobody bothers the house after that.

On the third day he finally sees them, close to nightfall. Three figures limned in light, with voices he can recognize even if he’s struggling with the words. Martin, Melanie, Basira. Chatting a bit, quiet but casual.

And one figure, dimmer than the other three, except for its burning eyes.

Of course. Of fucking _course._

They spend some time at the girl’s house, talking quietly, maybe taking some pictures? And when they leave, Tim falls in step behind them.

XXX

Miss Lawson’s squalid little terrace has nothing to tell them, it seems. They’re halfway back to the hotel when Melanie suddenly squeals “Selfie!” in a jarring, un-Melanie-like voice. She grabs Jon’s arm and pulls him close, holding her phone out in front of them with the front-facing camera active.

Jon’s baffled for half a second before he realizes she’s not actually focusing the camera on them, but a human-like figure some distance behind them. He has only a moment to take in its outline: tallish, long coat, a cap pulled low over its face. When she tries to actually snap the picture, the phone beeps and dies in her hand.

“Let’s find somewhere private to talk,” Jon tells the others in what he hopes is a casual tone. Basira seems to catch his meaning immediately; Melanie has to whisper to Martin and then lock his arm in hers so he doesn’t turn around and start staring.

They’d found their Burnt Man. Now what the hell were they going to do about it?

XXX

He doesn’t have to keep pace once he’s decided to follow. The light of them (well, three of them) blazes through any barriers, and whatever Tim is now is implacable, inevitable.

That doesn’t stop Basira from shooting him, when he rounds a corner after them.

He focuses, tries to think. It’s an alley between buildings, probably, and there’s a rattling something between him and them—chain link. He’d given them enough lead time to either hop the fence or find a way around it. And Basira just shot him, clear through the links, as if that was going to slow him down.

Maybe if she’d aimed for the head … he’s still getting a grip on _form_ again. She might’ve knocked him back. But Basira was never a firearms specialist, never a proper hunter like her partner. She’d aimed for the center of mass, no fancy stuff, just the place where most creatures shaped like people had a heart.

Tim reaches in, and find where the bullet came to a stop in him. “Oh, Jesus, what’s it doing,” that’s Melanie’s voice, right? Martin’s the wordless whimper? He catches the bullet and pulls it out, squinting at it in the eternal shadows. Not even any blood on it. Has he got blood?

“I don’t think that’s gonna hurt it, Jon,” he hears Basira say, and he laughs – tries to laugh – because she has no fucking idea about _hurt._

He laughs until he hears the Archivist say quietly, “I see you.”

XXX

Jon is queasy, horrified, at the knowledge welling up in his throat. But the Archivist in him keeps talking, because the Archivist doesn’t care about anything but understanding, and the thing—the _man_ in front of them goes very still. “The Beholding wasn’t ready to lose another of Its avatars so soon after the last one, was it? But there’s only one Power with dominion over death, and It doesn’t work for free.”

“What are you talking about?” Melanie asks from somewhere behind him. He has no bloody idea. He doesn’t know how he knows any of this, just knows as the words spill out of his mouth that they’re true, agonizingly true. That the reason for his miraculous survival has been talking the streets of Great Yarmouth, taking payment in empty clothes. The man in the long coat has stopped that horrible croaking laugh, and he is peering at Jon through the evening gloom with great black voids for eyes.

“The Eye had to make a trade,” he continued, practically shaking with the dawning clarity. “An avatar for an avatar. And when the time came, It had just the one to hand.” On the edge of suicide for six months or more, naming himself a sacrifice with his final statement…

“Is that what I am?” the Burnt Man croaks, as much felt as heard, like distant thunder. But the cadence, the intonation, is achingly familiar. “You and Elias sign me away as insurance?”

“No,” Jon insists. “God, no, it—I think this was, ah, directly negotiated. Power to Power.”

The Burnt Man looks down at his hands. It’s easy, Jon is realizing, to see why other witnesses mistook him for _burnt._ He’s as much void as man, a person-shaped gap in reality, threaded with strips of meat and splinters of bone that shift in and out of sight as he moves like a grotesque kaleidoscope. Those hands are more flesh than void at this point, but a sickly gray color that put Jon in mind of concrete dust and ashes. “And if I kill you,” he says slowly, enunciating with what passes for a mouth. “Do I break the contract?”

“I wish it were that simple,” Jon whispered. “I’m so sorry, Tim.”

Behind him, Martin gasps. In front of him. Tim suddenly lashes out, and shreds chain link like gossamer.

XXX

The broken wires of the fence pull and tear at his coat, rending the worn-out fabric. Good. Let the rest of them see a proper monster for once, since their Archivist has them fooled.

Except with his eyes squeezed shut in a flinch, it’s not the Archivist still standing between Tim and his shouting assistants. It’s the flickering wisp of Jonathan Sims, the parts that the Beholding hasn’t yet consumed.

Tim wonders if the End has left him even that much.

Basira keeps the gun on him, and Melanie tries to tug Jon back, but Martin—Christ, idiot Martin is come up closer and reaching for the tattered edge of a sleeve. “Tim? Is that really—?”

“Don’t touch me,” Tim grinds out, jerking aside and away. The broken fence shreds his coat further, exposing him more.

Martin shrugs off Melanie trying to drag him back as well. “But you’re—you—aren’t you? Still Tim?”

“How many people did Tim _murder,_ Martin?” Melanie hisses.

Jon opens his eyes, and it’s the Archivist’s merciless spotlight gaze. “Nineteen,” he rasps, like the answer’s been pulled out of him.

“Shut up.” Tim steps up toe-to-toe with the Archivist, making those lambent eyes turn up at him. Had he always been half a head taller than Jon? Did it even matter, with what they are now? Jon doesn’t flinch this time, but he also doesn’t retreat; if anything, he’s still trying to keep himself between Tim and the others, keep the best seat in the house for himself.

Tim could kill him, right here. Basira couldn’t possibly stop him even if she hit his face. He could punish the Eye that used him and sold him by taking its beloved Archivist. Whatever was left of the old Jon might even be glad to be put out of his misery.

But fucking Martin has to pipe up again, tries to get between them when just touching Tim could end him. “Stop,” he says with surprising firmness. “Jon, stop it. Just...we can...is there anything we can do to help?”

There was a version of him that would’ve snapped and sneered and told Martin to shut up, that some things can’t be helped. That version hadn’t spent Christ-knew-how-long alone in the dark, hadn’t died and been dragged out the other side of it, remade.

Tim opens his mouth—

XXX

"Some things can’t be helped, Martin,” Jon says, as kindly as he can, but lets himself get drawn back and away from Tim anyway. He chokes down the Archivist’s urge to add, _We_ _serve_ _the Beholding,_ _of course all we can do is watch._

“It hurts.”

The Burnt Man’s voice is still slurred, sepulchral, but he sounds more like the old Tim than ever. With his face turned down and away he looks almost human. His hands open and close, helplessly, on air, and the gaps in his flesh are dark and deep. “And killing helps, I assume?” Jon asks, careful not to turn the question into a compulsion. “Helps you become...more present, more anchored in the physical world.”

A jerky nod.

Basira exhales loudly through her teeth. “So I take it you’re not gonna stop.”

“Can’t.”

“So how do we make you stop?” Melanie asks.

“We _can’t--_ ” Martin starts.

“Nineteen people, Martin!”

“ _We_ can’t,” the Archivist says more firmly. “At least, not at this very moment. Unless you packed something more potent than a nine-millimeter handgun?”

(Jon swallows before he says: _The End is an ally, or at least not an active antagonist, and we cannot afford to anger It by destroying one of_ _I_ _ts avatars.)_

(Jon doesn’t say: _We can only obey our natures_ _._ _He_ _kills;_ _I watch.)_

Melanie throws her hands in the air and walks a short distance down the alley. Martin sighs explosively, and says, “If we walk away, we’re just as guilty, though. If we don’t try something—give him some kind of choice—”

Something fires in Jon’s brain then; not the Archivist, for once, but a conversation with a dead man half a world away. “Animals,” he blurts out, to get everyone’s attention. “Every living thing fears death, not just humans. Have you tried…?” He looks to Tim, who shrugs his half-formed shoulders.

“You’re just gonna take him to the RSPCA, are you?” Melanie calls from afar.

Basira, however, has put away the gun and pulled out her phone. “Did you see how many farms we drove past on the way here? Rather he take out a herd of pigs than any more people.”

It’s not a long-term solution. Not even a particularly good one. But it’s something to grasp in the endless slide towards the dark, and Jon is willing to take whatever he can get.

XXX

They drive him to a field in the middle of Norfolk, a cool and empty vastness dimly lit by the twinkling lights of wildlife. For safety’s sake, he rides in the boot.

They give him clothes, and a little cash, and Martin presses a cheap pre-paid phone on top of the pile. “In case...you know, if you want to get in touch?”

“Not hanging around?” Tim asks.

“Not unless you’d like a ride back,” Jon says from the car. “But...I can’t imagine you have any need for an audience.”

Tim laughs, or close to it. “Thought that was your _thing.”_

“True,” Jon says solemnly. “But as long as I still have a choice in the matter...”

The four of them drive away, back towards the A140. Tim slips into a barn full of sleeping animals, heavy with the smell of straw and manure. He goes to work.

XXX

Over the next several weeks, Jon keeps tabs on livestock losses in East Anglia. He keeps the statements about the Burnt Man of Yarmouth in his office, marked Internal Use Only, and pretends it’s for the protection of the police.

When the text message arrives, Jon doesn’t mention it to the others. He picks a coffee shop some distance from the Institute and tells Martin he might be taking a long lunch.

Tim looks human now, or at least mostly human-like, given the bloodless pallor. It’s cold enough weather that the gloves don’t stand out, even though the sunglasses rather do. “How long do we have before Elias spots us?” he asks, as Jon takes a seat with his americano. His voice even sounds like it used to, mostly. Just a faint extra reverberation, almost lost in the background noise. Infrasound.

“He won’t.” Jon assures him.

“How can you be sure?”

Jon makes a smile he doesn’t feel. “Because the institute loves me best.”

Tim laughs at that, just as bitterly. He’s got a coffee that he’s not drinking, and Jon suspects it went ice-cold the moment he touched it. “I owe you one. Which is why I haven’t tried to pay Elias a personal visit yet.”

“I appreciate that.”

“And I’m willing to owe you another,” Tim continued. “If you need anything, I dunno, dealt with.”

Jon doesn’t doubt the choice of _thing_ was deliberate. And the euphemism is fairly obvious when speaking to an avatar of death. “In exchange for what?”

Tim slides the sunglasses down his nose just far enough to reveal the voids behind his eyelids. “Figure out how to stop me,” he says flatly. “Because I don’t have as many options as you do.”

“The animals don’t…?”

“They’re not enough,” Tim says flatly, replacing the sunglasses. “Not for long. And this Millenial is not interested in killing Britain’s pork industry, anyway.”

“Right. Point taken.” The Archivist in him relishes the challenge, and Jon sympathizes with the feeling behind it. A time is coming when he, too, will need to be stopped. “I’ll see what I can find. Maybe put Melanie on it. It’ll give her a good outlet for her murderous impulses.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s the least I can do,” Jon says, and Tim nods in agreement.

He gets back to the Institute on time, and brings back coffees for his remaining assistants. Martin is pleased, Basira polite, Melanie suspicious. Jon accepts all three.

Then he pulls every file they have that could be related to the End, and goes to work.


End file.
